Possible: Obtaining originating sender information from email ???

J

jaypeezee

Gawd
Joined
Jun 11, 2003
Messages
1,000
Not sure if this is the correct place, but it seemed appropriate.

Is there any way to find out who the originating sender is on an email. I've tried reading the headers but it seems the IP addresses listed are the only ones for the mail servers.

What I'm looking to obtain is the specific IP of the computer the email was sent from - is this possible ? maybe im just not looking properly in the headers.

Also, if the above is possible, is it possible to maybe find out the IP of an email that was forwarded to someone, and then forwarded to me.

Been receiving a lot of prank emails lately, and at first it wasn't bothering me, but now it's becoming annoying. Would like to at least try and narrow it down =/
 
Uggh, dumb me. I was overlooking some additional header information. I think i've found it.

Now on to my next question; what's the best way to find information regarding IP ? any good sites - free ? Not expecting subscriber information just perhaps a general area and provider info
 
I wrote up How to track down the true source of an email a while back when a non-technical board I frequent starting getting lots of virus emails, which resulted in people blaming the wrong person for being infected.

http://samspade.org/ has changed since I wrote the article, but it'll still do WHOIS lookups for you. Even just looking up the hostname associated with an IP can sometimes give clues about it, as I mention in my article.

If the forwarded message was sent as an attachment, you should be able to open the attachment and view its headers just like an email you received. If they simply did a "regular" forward, then only the content of the body is forwarded on, and you'd only see the headers from the forwarder to yourself.
 
I use nwtools.com (actually network-tools.com now I beleive) myself.
dnsstuff.com is another one I've used.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top